France Loses Triple-A Status After Fitch Downgrade

By Michael Aneiro

France on Friday lost its last vestige of triple-A status as Fitch Ratings became the third major rating agency to strip France of its top-tier credit rating, downgrading it by one notch to double-A plus. Last November Moody’ssimilarly downgraded France, after Standard & Poor’s had previously done the same. The downgrade comes on a day when European bonds were already making headlines, particularly with a sharp slide in Portuguese bond prices.

From Fitch today:

Fitch now forecasts general government gross debt (GGGD) to peak higher at 96% of GDP in 2014 and decline only gradually over the long term, remaining at 92% in 2017. This compares with Fitch’s previous projections in December 2012 of GGGD peaking at 94%, and declining more rapidly to below 90% by 2017.

The agency commented at the time of its previous rating review that this was the limit of the level of indebtedness consistent with France retaining its ‘AAA’ status assuming debt was firmly placed on a downward path from 2014. Its projections for France’s GGGD ratio are significantly higher than the ‘AAA’ median of 49% and ‘AA’ median of 27%. The only ‘AAA’ country with a higher debt ratio is the US (AAA/Negative), which has exceptional financing flexibility and debt tolerance afforded by the preeminent global reserve currency status of the US dollar.

Risks to the agency’s fiscal projections lie mainly to the downside, owing to the uncertain growth outlook and the ongoing eurozone crisis, even assuming no wavering in commitment to fiscal consolidation. A debt ratio that is higher for longer reduces the fiscal space to absorb further adverse shocks.

Amey Stone is Barron’s Income Investing blogger and Current Yield columnist. She was formerly a managing editor at CBS MoneyWatch, MSN Money and AOL DailyFinance. Her responsibilities included overseeing market coverage and personal finance topics. Prior to those roles, she was a senior writer at BusinessWeek where she authored the Street Wise column online and contributed to the magazine’s Inside Wall Street column. Topics covered included economics, corporate finance, Fed policy, municipal bonds, mutual funds and dividend investing. She co-authored King of Capital, a biography of Citigroup Chairman Sandy Weill. She is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.